February 2005

As an FYI … we’re doing a couple of things to make SFX whole again as well as get the rest of the OSL-hosted Mozilla infrastructure on solid footing.

This morning we repurposed one of the hosts serving up www.mozilla.org to be a full-time database server. This is a very robust piece of hardware and this machine will serve as the primary database server for SFX. Moving forward, we will be migrating the databases for other services hosted here at the OSL (I mention the OSL only because we wanted to have a DB server local to the services hosted here). More on this in a bit.

Now we have seperate caching, application and database servers for SFX and the site appears to be much snappier and scalable. We’ll be watching the new setup over the next couple of days to make sure everything is working appropriately.

We have several other services (download.mozilla.org, UMO, etc) hosted here that we need infrastructure for and to that end we will be purchasing equipment to shore up our existing applications as well as scale it even further. This will entail a redesign of how we’re delivering our services to folks; most of this should be entirely transparent to the end users. The purchase of this equipment will also allow us to move machines around to needed services as they see increased load/usage/growth.

Once this new equipment is here, we will be repurposing the machine that is currently serving up UMO and turning it into a backup database server doing replication with the existing DB server.

Sorry for all of the recent SFX outages; this is on the radar now and will hopefully be much more stable moving forward.

I got to attend the OSDL’s Enterprise Linux Summit which was in Burlingame just south of the San Francisco airport. It was a good conference but by far the most fun was the keynote with Linus, Andrew Morton, Brian Behlendorf and Mitch Kapor.

It was funny at the start of the talk when Stuart Cohen introduced Linus he even said “and voted one of 2004’s most influential people, Linus Torvalds.” We all saw Linus sort of blush, push back from his chair a bit and put his hands up like “what am I suppose to say about that?!” Quite hilarious.

The keynote panel was about an hour and a half and the whole time you could see the press scribbling away on their notepads, etc. trying to quantify this “open source” thing. With Linus on this panel, they had quite a hayday with things he said. Honestly I don’t envy him a bit; he’s just up there talking about a job he obviously loves and everybody wants to turn him into something he’s not: a visionary. During the talk Linus even said he’s the “anti-visionary” … “I don’t trust people with visions” he said. I love it.

You sort of saw the same thing with the latest Wired cover story about Firefox. Here Blake and Ben have slaved away at a great product and now the press wants them to be the poster children for killing Microsoft. Dear lord, give it a rest.

Fortunately, I think the future is bright. Hordes of open source hackers quietly quietly doing their thing will overwhelm folks. It’s the fact that things like Blogs are taking hold, wikinews is on the rise, etc. It’s so hard to quantify yet so obvious this rise of FOSS.

I did have the chance to talk with Linus in the elevator on the way down to the conference but I didn’t say a thing. Lord knows he doesn’t need another person hassling him.

Having been at the heart of the distribution of Firefox for the 1.0 release (and subsequent meltdown of the mirror network) I’m always wondering about better ways to get Firefox to the masses.

It occurred to me that if there was a Bittorrent plugin for Firefox (that completely eliminated the need for a secondary client) that you would have a very powerful tool on your hands. Not only could you distribute updates faster to thousands of clients everywhere, you’d have a base install of other Firefox users that would be seeding a huge network of bittorrents. Firefox would then be the P2P client … I’ll let you decide if that’s a good idea or not …

I know that for the Firefox 1.0 release the MoFo had a bittorrent tracker up and they saw about 10,000 downloads from it on the first day (that compared to 1 million total downloads for the same day). The reports were that it was rather slow and even Bram Cohen, the author of Bittorrent, has said it does not make sense for smaller files.

In looking at the current release of Firefox, we have an installer that we need to distribute to clients that is anywhere from 4.9Mb to 8.5Mb depending on your platform. Now, if you could somehow tie the bittorrent plugin for Firefox into the UMO service you would have a very powerful way to update clients. UMO could initiate by notifying the client that “hey, you have an update that is ready!” Then the user would click on “Install Update” which would initiate the download via bittorrent. The client would close the browser, install the update and then open Firefox back up. At that point, you could have the client join the bittorrent network again for a specified amount of time (say 10 minutes) so that it could continue to seed the bittorrent for that Firefox release. No point in having 10 million seeds for a less than 10Mb file; keep that number as small as possible. In addition, there is no reason you’d have to have everybody using the same tracker; if you split it up across several trackers you could get redundancy and scalability for the BT network.

Anyways, just a thought.